In cellular telephony, it is common to feed radio signals generated by individual channel units into amplifiers and then to combine these signals in an autotuning combiner before relaying them further to an antenna for broadcast to subscriber units. A common type of autotuning combiner has a set of cavity filters which are tuned using an adjuster. The adjuster is a moving mechanical element inside a physical cavity which is moved within the cavity to adjust the resonant frequency of the cavity. Typically, such an adjuster is tuned based on the radio frequency signal received from the amplifier. However, when the radio frequency signal is turned off, the resonant frequency of the cavity is free to drift. This resonant frequency drift can result from drift of the adjuster position or environmental effects and results in a one-half to two second delay in the effectiveness of the filter when a new RF frequency signal is received. In most telephony applications this delay is of little concern because there is a one-half to two second delay between the initiation of a telephone call and the transmission of any significant information. However, in other telephony applications, it may be desirable to transmit information immediately upon the establishment of a telephone call. It may also be desirable to transmit information on the carrier frequency in bursts with short delays between the signal bursts. In such a system, the extended delay would distort or destroy a significant amount of the data in each burst.